Communication with customers and the importance of addressing customer concerns continues to grow in importance. Sentiment is generally regarded as an opinion or attitude towards something or someone or the expression of the opinion or attitude. With written, global communications on the rise, companies are developing methods and systems to determine sentiment when communications include information about the company. It may be critically important for reputation and branding to be able to respond quickly to expressed written sentiment (especially if it is negative).
Current methods of determining sentiment are either ineffective or inefficient, especially when analyzing messages in different languages. For example, emoticons are often used but may be culturally ambiguous and are not good indicators especially in a noisy environment. The company needs an efficient way to determine that a message, even in a foreign language, is negative and requires agent attention.